Episode 230: Crush and Make 2022 Your Year
The year 2022 is here and for the past two years, the entire world changed in life and business. In this episode, Adam Stott reflects on the past years and talks about the changes they brought.
Adam explains how communication has changed, the challenges businesses face and how to overcome them. He shares his learnings and experience when starting a business during an economic recession and explains how to utilize the new digital world in growing a business. Adam believes that anyone who takes action will crush 2022 and make it their year.
Show Highlights:
- The lack of consumer confidence during the lockdown
- What to do when facing business challenges
- How to take charge of your own economy
- Finding ways to connect with people and build relationships online; and
- Start to take control and master your business online
Links Mentioned:
Join the Ultimate Three Day Business Event and learn more Business Growth Secrets
Be part of our Facebook Group Big Business Events Members Network
Connect with Adam Stott on Instagram @adamstottcoach
Transcript:
Please note this is a verbatim transcription from the original audio and therefore may include some minor grammatical errors.
Adam Stott:
Hello, everybody and Happy New Year. Welcome to 2022. Adam Stott here. Your host is super excited to be doing today’s podcast. I feel that over the past year, it’s been a transformational and a different year for many, many people. Some of you might have crushed it and had a brilliant year where everything went right for you. Some of you might have found it to be quite challenging, with everything that’s been going on in the marketplace.
I wanted to talk a little bit about challenges today, how you can overcome those challenges and the mentality that you’ve got to have in order to succeed. I think that’d be really, really important. And give a bit of background on what it was we were doing last year. And really sort of recap on that I think that can add some value to people in terms of getting you motivated on how to start this year and go out of the gates and really go for it. Hopefully, when you’ve started you’ll know you really, really, really well.
Now, last year was 2021. For businesses, it was a difficult thing. And a reason it was a difficult thing, for a few different reasons. One, maybe a lack of consumer confidence. Now, obviously, at the beginning of the year, we started the beginning of a year off in this massive lockdown. And for a lot of people, that’s difficult. Because she was stopped from doing business, you can do business for a lot of people. Then we came out of this year, and maybe you came out and you really succeeded.
And you flew out the traps. You did some great things, or perhaps you still found things difficult. I want to explain, for everybody, what’s changed. Because I think there’s a lot that has changed over the past couple of years in the way that we do business. I think there’s a big change. One of the big changes, certainly for a lot of businesses out there is a lack of consumer confidence.
Consumer confidence is when people maybe they used to go to a gym, or they used to go to a spa or used to go to a salon. Because of the constant news and the constant negativity, their habits changed. And maybe they got used to keeping track of different habits or doing some different things or spending their time in a different way. And that could have affected your business.
So maybe you came out of lockdown, you’re expecting to fly up. But instead, some of the old customers you had didn’t come back. Or maybe they didn’t feel comfortable coming back, or maybe they wanted to be around people. That was a big thing. For a lot of businesses, a lack of consumer confidence hurt people in a big, big way.
So, how do you get over having a lack of consumer confidence, especially if it affected your old business, you repeat business? Well, of course, you’ve got to go out and get new customers, you’ve got to get new clients. And we’ll talk about that because that’s really, really important. Secondly, perhaps you were affected as an individual. Maybe you got affected where you felt you had a lack of control. And I think this is a big thing for a lot of businesses.
The reason I think this is a big thing is that your motivation might have been affected. And by the way, I want to make sure this is completely clear. I want to bring up a couple of the issues because I think we’ve got to talk about these things in order to overcome them.
Then we’ve got to look at what the solutions are and over these things. How do we go and get new clients because of a lack of consumer confidence? Or a lack of confidence from our existing customers who maybe didn’t come back? Number one, number two, that lack of control for you, as a business owner? Do you feel that previously prior to everything that happened over the past couple of years, you had a massive amount of control, and all of a sudden maybe impacted you from making moves? And I think this is something that affected people that maybe they don’t realize affected them.
If you used to be a bit braver in your marketing, if you used to be a bit more ambitious, in your amount of prospecting. Did you know if you used to be more ambitious in the amount of sales based conversations you were having? Over the past year, you didn’t find yourself having those sales based conversations, you didn’t find yourself, marketing your business in the most effective way. And perhaps you haven’t actually even put your finger on it yet. But maybe there’s a little bit of a lack of confidence issue that has arisen for you. And this can affect people that have been in business for many, many years. Or it can affect newbie businesses, of course, in the same way. And the reason I want to bring this up is what’s the cure to that?
I think the cure that we’ve got to realize is that if we can’t be an entrepreneur, as a business leaders, we can’t allow that lack of confidence to affect us. We can’t allow the lack of consumer confidence to affect us. We can’t allow these things to control the decisions we make. And I just want to sort of say that you need to be brave. I think it’s really really important to be brave. You need to be courageous. You need to be motivated, especially in what for a lot of people has been a difficult time.
So even if you have had it where you felt a little bit down. Or you felt that oh, it’s not working as well as it used to. You got to pick yourself up. You got to dust yourself off and you got to go again and that is the true test of a real entrepreneur. A real entrepreneur can operate in difficult times.
Now, let me tell you this, when I started my very first business, the first business ever started. I started it all the way back in 2008. And if you can imagine I was 25 years old. I was full of ambition full of drive full of determination, I’d had pretty reasonable success in my career. I’ve got actually a book coming out this year, where I talk a lot about my backstory. Some of the things that I was doing, which I think a lot of people want to enjoy. I think to be really good for a lot of people to say.
When I started off, I remember being full of passion, full of motivation, full drive, and determination. And very quickly, as I got into my first business at age 25, it was in 2008. In 2008, all of a sudden, I remember picking up the newspaper one day, and I still read The Sun. Don’t judge me on that. I do enjoy reading the sun.
And I was reading The Sun newspaper, and I remember seeing it on the front cover. All about Northern Rock, and all these queues forming and people going there to get their money out. That we were in the midst of a financial crisis. That was the only time that I can like what’s happened over the past couple of years that I’ve been in business back in 2008, to what’s happening now. As this crisis went on this financial crisis, there will be repercussions and a big impact on the industry.
And I learned a couple of things there. I want to share these things along with you because I’m hoping they can add some value too. Because what happened is I could have been consumed by what was going on in the outside world. And I could have taken those newspapers, I could have gotten negative about it. I could have been like, oh my god, I’ve just started my business, I can’t do this. At the time, that’s why I wanted to do this wherever unless your first instinct isn’t to panic or worry.
And I remember having a conversation with a good friend of mine, one of my mentors, and he said to me, Adam, and we were talking about the economy. And he said this is the thing about the economy. He said, “everyone in the UK lives in the economy, really wherever there’s inflation, whether there is, you know, a lack of consumer confidence, whether there’s a financial crisis, whatever is going on, that’s the wider economy”. But however, as your business grew over the last couple of months. I said, yeah, we’re growing loads, we’re getting new customers, things are going well. And we’re actually building forward. And he said, well, the thing is, you’re not actually in a recession. The UK might be in a recession, but your business isn’t in a recession.
So, what do you mean by that? Of course, we’re in a recession, everyone’s in recession. It’s on the front pages in the newspapers. And he said, “No, a recession is judged by negative growth in the GDP of the economy”. All right, but your business is not in a recession, your business is growing, you’re making more money, and you’re getting new customers, and it’s growing. And I said, yeah, that’s true. So he said your business isn’t in a recession.
So we’ll stop thinking you have stopped buying into the media, and the newspaper stories that tell you you’re not growing. And instead of doing that, look at your business and manage your own growth, and realize you’re in charge of your own economy. And if you look at it like that, and you analyze it like that, then you’re going to start to think about things in a different way. So I took that on board, I thought about it. And I realized, actually, yeah, why am I getting wrapped up in what other people are saying and other things are going on.
I’m in control of my own destiny. And for me, that’s what an entrepreneur is. An entrepreneur is somebody that’s in control of their own destiny, an entrepreneur, somebody who’s in control of their own growth. And if your business has grown, or you want to grow your business, there has never been a better time, or an easier time to go and grow and get customers and get clients than there is right now.
And even if you’ve struggled and even if you make some you might need to hear this message, some you might not need to hear this message. Some of you might be super positive, or alone, even bringing the negative in. I can’t even handle it. Right. But what I want to do is bring the negative in and tell you what a negative doesn’t actually apply to you, and why you’re in control of your own future. Because I think it’s really, really important. Just in case, a few of you out there that listen to the podcast, at least hear this message, right.
So that was a big wake up call for me. And instead of participating in the UK wide recession in 2008, I went out and grew my business and in the first year for 2 million pound. The next year, it’s 2.9 million pounds a year after that 4.3 then a year that didn’t grow that was really hard to work more hours work my socks off and in grad school, and in fact, I make less profit and I’ve got 4.4 And I thought oh my god, what am I doing wrong?
Then at that stage, I decided that I wanted to learn and crush marketing. We grew from 4.3 million to like 6.8 to 14 million and so on and so on and so on and kept growing and kept growing and kept growing. And that was really, really cool. But I learned a lot of experiences during that first business that I had. It wasn’t always good times or bad times at the end. And that’s kind of what happens, you know, sometimes.
For people, you have your peaks, you have your different issues that come up and every different thing that happens. But you learn a lot of lessons along the way. And those lessons, certainly that I learned back in 2008 gave me a really good grounding, to get the setup right in 2021, to allow us to go out crushing 2022.
Now the thing is, I’d say to anybody listening right now, whether you’re a bricks and mortar business, whether you’ve got a shop, you’ve got something where people need to come and see you. Even if you run a salon, whether you run a recruitment company, whether you do statics, whatever it is you do, you still need to find a way to connect with people, and build relationships online, in order to make sure that those relationships that you build online, become your customers and your clients offline. And that’s even if you’ve got bricks and mortar business, whatever it is that you do, you still need to go out and create those relationships online.
Why? Because we’re in a digital world. One thing that happened in the last two years, is the entire world changed in the community way people communicate. I’ve been using zoom since probably about 2000… I don’t know 2012, where I remember one of the first coaching programs I ever got into was zoom coaching, I think that was in back then.
So it might be 2013. quite remember. But that was the first time I started using Zoom. And most people had no idea what zoom was, they didn’t know. And I used to go on to their coaching program, and talk to my coaches in America via video call when you know it is good coaching. I enjoyed the process, right.
However, up until two years ago, that is where zoom became mainstream, it became massively mainstream. Everybody in the country knows that everybody in the country uses it. And if you’re not using that as an asset for your business, right now, you need to be using that for assets for your asset for your business. So if your bricks and mortar business or you’re somebody that needs to have a conversation with people before selling your product or service, you need to embrace them, start using it, start using it as a way to convert customers. You don’t need to go out and travel as much, you need to integrate that with what you do.
So for me, we did an event we started off 2020, so really well, like really well. We held an event on the eighth of January, where 250 entrepreneurs got tons and tons and tons of new clients that filled up the first few events that we’re going to do this year.
We’ve got another one coming up, I think it’s on the 22nd. If you go over to my Instagram, adamstottoach, and we’re doing a full day of training on Zoom, you can literally go and click the link and get yourself registered and come join us on having it’s awesome, right? Especially being listened to a podcast for a while when you haven’t actually spent some time for some event now from a country where and how many can come on that venue. That’s right.
And you like starting that event off getting to know those people and building those relationships, I was talking with them about really the four steps that any business can use on social media to go and get clients. The first step is you need to go out and build an audience. As I’ve said before, if you haven’t got an audience that needs to be pivotal now, you can’t be anyone online, who you are online is who you are in today’s world.
Why is that because every time somebody goes and looks at you, one of the first thing they’re gonna do is they’re gonna look at you on Google, they’re gonna look at you on your social media profiles, they’re going to get to know you, they are going to judge whether you like it or not like it and I’m not even saying it’s right, whether you like it or not like it, they are going to judge you based on your profiles.
And they are going to decide if you are a person of value or not based on your social media. So the thing that we need to do is we need to make sure that our social media is right, we build an audience, we build that social profile. And secondly, we need to get used to chatting and building relationships with people on social media.
So we can convert those new conversations into consultation calls, or meetings, or events, or getting them to go on your website to buy your products or services. So you start to earn more money. And the four steps is building an audience chat with that audience, building a relationship, turning them into prospects by using funnels, and from there start to monetize. They’re the four steps, right? Really simple. And I teach that at the event. So wherever you’re at, and you’ve been listening to this podcast today are a few things we’ve discussed.
First of all, these are the tips I’m going to give you the business growth secrets one, wherever you’re at, however you’re failing. Understand that in 2020, so it’s yours to build. It’s your economy. Your business is your own economy. You are a business owner, you are a business entrepreneur, you are somebody that has got the keys to your kingdom and you’ve got to get there and you gotta drive it. Regardless of what’s going on around you.
Don’t buy into the news. Don’t buy into negativity, instead purely focus on you and if you do that you’re going to get better results will want number too, we need to make sure that no matter what has happened in terms of the consumer confidence, you don’t let that affect your confidence, your ability to grow your business is in your control, right? You have got pure control of that, especially if you start to master online. And number three, we’ve got to master online and get ourselves out there, understanding how to use that four step process is really important. That’s what I wanted to share with you today. This guy will make 2022 your year, I’ve got no doubt in my mind that you can go and crush it.
If you’re listening to this podcast. Now it tells me, you’re one of the top 10% somebody that’s driven somebody motivate somebody who wants to take action, especially if you’re somebody that sits there and you take this in and maybe you make notes and you want to actually go and create those results on absolutely so that you can 100% do it.
So that’s my message for you, may 2022 be your year, you know, build your confidence. Make sure you go and take the actions necessary, be brave, be courageous, you gotta build relationships, and 2022 can be your year, my friend, and hopefully you enjoyed today’s podcast. You haven’t already made sure you guys subscribe. Really important. And if you enjoyed the podcast, give us a nice review. You know all the reviews. Say what we have done before. Anyone can give us a nice five-star review. We’ll make sure we get in touch and we’ll get you one of my planners out so you can make 2022 a year. Thanks, everybody. I’ll see you soon.